A lot of people say they distinguish between individual Fahrenheit degrees, but I’ve never seen nor heard anyone actually doing so. What’s the temperature today? It’s in the low 40s. Or the high 80s, or the single-digits, or whatever. You might set your home thermostat to, say, 72, but none of them are that precise, anyway.
The American system is fine for anyone who doesn’t actually use units at all, which to be fair, is most people. But if you’re not actually using units at all, it shouldn’t matter to you what system is used by the people who are using them. And the people who do use units, almost universally prefer metric.
My point is that for climate science, people are probably going to be using an SI unit anyway. For everyday use, I like the “feeling” of how far apart “really hot” and “really cold” are numerically. The individual degrees aren’t important, so much as the feeling of the distance between noticeable temperature gradients.
It’s true that it’s a continuum, but exceptions don’t disprove the fact of metrification if metric units are predominant. In Canada, for instance, oven calibrations are generally in Fahrenheit as are most temperatures specified by recipes, and sports traditions like references to “yards” in football remain intact, but few would dispute that Canada is officially and in every practical sense metric. Metrification became official many years ago and ever since then, highway signs have been in kilometers and speed limits in km/h, gas sold by the liter, food by the gram or kg, temperatures other than for cooking specified in Celsius, etc. The exceptions are just oddities of life and leftovers of tradition that don’t much matter.
And in fact Burma (Myanmar) has made several announcements in recent years about officially moving to metric, but apparently due to changes in government and general chaos it’s gotten delayed. But according to this, it’s become largely metric anyway: the article says that because cars are all imported from neighboring countries, their instrumentation is metric so road signs in Myanmar are mostly metric, fuel is sold in liters, and temperatures reported in Celsius. So really, Liberia and the USA are now pretty much the last holdouts.
Every digital thermostat I’ve seen is settable in half degrees Celsius, and the default hysteresis is generally a maximum of half a degree above and below the setting, so that the maximum temperature variation is at most one Celsius degree, but sometimes less. The precision of the set point really has nothing to do with the variation the thermostat allows.
I’m working in supply chain for one of the major Japanese electronics firms and all the TVs and flat screen panels we sell in Oceania (and afaik throughout SE Asia) are in cm.
I think there should be a unit of 5 kilometers, which we can call the “league”, because that is adequately close to the classical unit. “League” is easier to say, and probably more useful, being longer than Kms.
You meant accurate. I’m not sure at all how accurate my home thermostat is, but it is precise. At the beginning of the season, I set it. If I’m chilly, I push it up 1 degree F and I can tell the difference.
My car’s AirCon offers decimal degree control on temperature.
You can have say 22.1C on the drivers side and 22.2C for the passenger.
And if that translates into any measurable, let alone discernible difference for anybody in the seat I’d be stunned. Would be similarly surprised if the differential was 1C.
I agree with all of this. There is simply no good reason to have a national campaign to eradicate standard units of measure.
I can think of two metric measures that have actually taken hold in the United States: The two liter bottles of soda and the 750ml bottles of liquor.
In the latter examples, people still refer to them as “fifths” of liquor meaning one-fifth of a gallon. Would metric conversion criminally or civilly punish liquor stores from referring to them as fifths?
People do, however, refer to two-liter bottles of soda as “two liter bottles.” How has that made a positive impact on my life? If I had to buy two quart bottles of soda would I suffer from some sort of depression?
If we were simply starting from scratch, I would agree with the arguments that some metric units are better, but some are not. But the proposal is a massive and forced change from the established system to a different one with no real benefit. I can say that my car gets 25mpg and everyone knows what I am talking about. If you want to say that your car gets so many km per liter of gasoline, then nothing is stopping you from doing that.
I don’t understand why having units divisible by ten is such a supposedly overwhelming advantage. Most people can divide by two, four or eight as well and given the emergence of computers, computation is even easier.
As others have mentioned, Fahrenheit is far more useful for everyday temperature observations. Why is it easier to say that water freezes at 0 rather than 32? 0F to 100F represents the reasonable range of most temperatures that human beings are exposed to. Below zero is exceptionally cold and above 100 is exceptionally hot.
One correction here, decimal is a true PITA in computers.
The binary equivalent of (0.1)[sub]10[/sub] is not representable in a finite number of bits, and computers have a finite number of bits.
(0.1)[sub]10[/sub] is aproximated as (0.00011001100110011001100110011001100110011…)[sub]2[/sub]
Having units divisible by ten is only advantage due to the happenstance that our number system ended up being base 10.
If only the Dozenal Society had been better at politics a few thousand years ago. But the standards foundations had to work with what they had. Having one international system of measurement is the main advantage. The metric system is far from perfect in several aspects but it is what we have on the international stage.
Actually, get there before I do. Put tape over the digital display on my desktop thermometer. Then after I’ve been sitting there a couple of hours, ask me what the temperature on the display is. Bet you $100 I’d get it within 1 degree Fahrenheit.
In fact if you use your thumb and touch each one of those counting is easier than using two hands and folding for 10 and you have a whole other hand to use for the other unit place.
The rolleyes are such a great debate tactic…but you are wasting something we count in sexagesimal or base 60, which existed before your base 10 math systems…time.
How about a cite showing Hindu-Arabic numerals are the only option
Yes we have ten fingers on two hands, but we also have 12 segments on one hand and 10 won out due to just how history worked out.
That’s just silly. The most useful temperature standard is the one most closely aligned with relevant physical realities. The only thing “useful” about Fahrenheit is that many people have become accustomed to it, nothing more. Having 0 and 100 as the “standards” for “colder than I would like” and “too hot for me” is hardly meaningful or scientific, nor is the larger magnitude of the Celsius degree any sort of obstacle to accuracy. You say 98°C is too hot for you, I say 37°C is too hot for me. What’s the difference?
The real difference is rational baselines like 1 cc of pure water weighs one gram at its maximum density, there are 1000 grams in a kg and 1000 meters in a km; 0°C isn’t just some arbitrary “wow that’s cold” baseline, it’s the temperature below which water ceases to be a liquid and becomes potentially dangerous ice when traveling – all of this together makes the whole system far more rational and ultimately I would say more intuitive. Sure, you can argue that the US – in sole solidarity with Liberia – stuck to the old system and survived, but it’s not argument for rationality or efficiency, either domestically or with regard to international trade.
It’s that having 10- and 100-point scales is something we’re all used to. (How many tests does one take in school that are graded on a 0-to-100 scale? I’m sure I had well over a thousand of them.) I don’t know if it’s ‘natural’ or not, but it sure feels that way. So a 0-to-100 scale that closely encompasses the normal range of temperatures one experiences in a temperate climate feels intuitive in a way that a -20 to 40 scale doesn’t.
Sure, Celsius is more scientific, but unless one is a physical scientist, that doesn’t matter much. What’s the temperature water boils at? Well, I put a pot of water on the burner, turn it to high, and several minutes later the water is boiling. I know it boils at 212 F. or 100 C. but it isn’t a number I use when I boil water, and it’s not a temperature I encounter outside the kitchen. It’s just one of those numbers one memorized in school.
It isn’t like you intuitively learned to count to 10, someone taught you that and it took us humans hundreds of thousands of years to create the concept.
Perhaps you should check your assumptions, and check if your arguments are due to cultural bias.
Absolutely nothing is special about our fingers as to force us to use them in one exact and specific way to end up with 10. Heck had they skipped the thumbs we may have ended up with base 8 numbers.
An earlier poster missed a few metric units commonly used in the US: grams for some dietary and medicinal products, and ‘5k’ and other distances for sports (mostly running). Oh yeah, and watts for electrical power – but not so much for any other power measurement, hah. Liters as a measure of automobile engine size is more common than cubic inches now, I think.
I think we’re slowly catching on to the metric system. Hey, not so long ago, stock prices used to be fractional, not decimal, so I don’t think making a decimal switch for other measures would be all that huge a deal. Take your car to Canada or Mexico; it doesn’t take long to get a feel for what ‘next exit 500 m’ means.
But I expect the process will be gradual and slow. We’re already used to several measures of the same kind for different things, so there’s no big deal for adding liters to ounces, cups, pints, quarts, gallons, cubic feet, board feet, and many more besides.
If you want divisible units, simply make 300 mm a standard for sizes: that’s 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 x 5 mm.
